systemd cat and GNU cat hugging a Linux cat.
I misread and wondered when did systemd release cat as in the software not the animal.
Void Linux, although I use NixOS nowadays.
systemdis fine. The only people I’ve ever heard complain about it are lonely neckbeards pretending like their opinion somehow matters.I’ve used Debian as a server system since it was using
init.d. And do you know what I found?systemdis easier. And the fact that Debian of all distros decided to use it says a lot.It says that you barely can have Systemd and alternatives in the same repo without shims and patches.
That wasn’t the question though.
No its a valid discussion.
There are other init systems.
System service managers like systemd, OpenRC, runit, or SysVinit often come down to user preference. While these systems are crucial for initializing and managing services on servers, where uptime, resource allocation, and specific daemon behaviors are important, their impact on a typical desktop or laptop is generally minimal.
For most personal devices, the primary functions of a service manager occur largely out of sight. As long as the system boots reliably and applications run smoothly, the underlying service manager rarely registers as a significant factor in the daily user experience.
For many, including myself, systemd simply works without much fuss. My choice to stick with it isn’t due to strong conviction or deep technical analysis, but rather the simple fact that I’ve rarely, if ever, had to interact with it directly. For my personal desktop and laptop, it reliably handles booting, service management, and shutdown in the background. If it’s not broken and isn’t hindering my daily computing, there’s no compelling reason to explore alternatives.
@furycd001 @nutbutter Technically, it’s broken. If you run screen/tmux built without systemd support, it will be killed on logout. Systemd requires every program that needs daemonize link libsystemd0 only to notify systemd to keep it running. So it’s broken, but worked-around in every software which need daemonize
If you run screen/tmux built without systemd support, it will be killed on logout.
Actually, if you run anything and logout, it will be killed after a timeout. The way to prevent this in systemd land is to enable-linger for that user.
IMO this is a pretty sane default and it’s easy enough to disable for users
EDIT: For non-root users
@InnerScientist This might be good behaviour (especially on shared multiuser system)
But how often you using shared multiuser systems in 2025? In 2015? In 2010 this might be useful, but now we are using containers instead.
When you have single root user, single unpriveleged user and few service users, such behaviour is just useless. If interactive user left some services running, it’s usually intentional. And systemd requires notify about this intention every time. Why? It’s just useless complexity.
Systemd requires every program that needs daemonize link libsystemd0
No, that’s only if you want the health check feature, so that systemd can distinguish between e.g. “The process is started” and “The HTTP server is bound and listening”
You can run hello world and a
sleep()loop as a systemd daemon. You can run a Bash script as a systemd daemon.I’m pretty sure that notification is also like 5 lines of code. You read an env var and that tells you a pipe to send a single character on.
You are not obligated to use libsystemd. And if you were you could certainly layer another init system inside of it
That sounds like a design decision (not saying it’s good or bad here), not something broken.
So, running a program incompatible with a particular system leads to incompatibilities?
Wow, who’d have thought…
@lka1988 why systemd needs some extra compatibility? If it designed to work, it must just work, not requiring changing evertyhing around
Ok, let me spell this out for you:
IF YOU RUN A PROGRAM THAT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH A CERTAIN PART OF THE CORE SYSTEM, DON’T BE SURPRISED WHEN IT LEADS TO INCOMPATIBILITIES.
System service managers like systemd, OpenRC, runit, or SysVinit often come down to user preference.
And coding best-practice. And a philosophy borne of bad luck and bad software that aims to resist monoculture.
But that lennart kid is cool for a Microsoft employee.
GrapheneOS, I assume
PalmOS. So simplistic yet powerful. I miss those old PDAs :(
There was a lack of sinisterness to the PalmOS ecosystem that we’ve lost.
Sinisterness?
I may have phrased that in a strange double negative way.
Modern mobile platforms like Android and iOS are sinister in a way that PalmOS wasn’t. PalmOS, becasue the devices weren’t connected to the internet much if at all, didn’t have the big brother always watching and trying to come up with new ways to exploit the user as is standard today.
OS400 (IBM i)
Haiku is pretty neat
catpropagandaOS/2
OpenWRT
Alpine
macOS. I find it to be the least inconvenient for most of my needs.
Forced to use macOS at work, and for me it sucks (only slightly less than Windows):
- Slow UI (have to wait several seconds after login before spotlight is able to execute custom scripts)
- Finder is a PITA and one of the dumbest file managers I was ever forced to use
- No easy way to provision the system
- Annoying nagging to use all the Apple services/login with Apple ID
- Shitty software management (instead of a descent package manager, every fucking application has a popup for its own updates after opening, which breaks my flow)
- macOS only interacts decently with other Apple devices (iPhone etc.) and has its own ‘standards’, taking away my freedom to choose what I want to use.
Of course, your needs are your needs and if macOS fits your needs the best, all power to you.
Those seem like reasonable points, I think.
I don’t use any other Apple devices, so I have no opinion on that. And I don’t often find myself provisioning macOS, but I use Nix to manage my system, so transferring to a new MacBook has been pretty easy for me.
I tend to do a lot of Linux-ey things, and macOS (Unix-based) is much closer to that than Windows is. Also, I often see programming languages/runtimes that require extra/different steps to get up and running in Windows vs. Linux and macOS.
Sure, Windows has WSL, but every time I’ve needed to do some IO-heavy operations with it, it was extremely slow. (Though it has been a few years, so maybe it’s better now?)
I also do a lot of web dev, so macOS offers a few more tools. If Safari wasn’t so terrible, then macOS would become less necessary. But AFAIK (I haven’t checked in a while), macOS is the only environment that can run Safari in an iOS emulator.
My second choice would be NixOS… or maybe Ubuntu.
Windows seems a bit bloated to me. I remember seeing something in the Start menu about X-Box, and I couldn’t uninstall it, for some reason. I could remove the icon from the menu, but it still linked to some binary that was installed with the OS. I’m not a gamer, why do I need that on my system? Also, why did I have to uncheck so many data harvesting options during setup? I’m not very comfortable with things like that being built in to the OS, and enabled by default. I remember a time when things like that were commonly known as “spyware” – I guess it’s just normalized now. (To be fair, I’m not a fan of having to decline Apple Intelligence multiple times on macOS either.)
Same here. Got a MacBook from work, it launches a browser, it’s almost all I need.
Add android to the mix.
They use the spiritual predecessor of systemd, launchd, so I’m not sure if this counts.
Unpopular opinion but I respect it
Totally Guix, it has no systemd and is able to roll back to the last working in case you break anything somehow
I was literally reading your guide about bonfire moments ago.
For those who don’t have a problem with systemd, there is NixOS, which offers the same capabilities as guix, while having a larger community and way more available packages available in its repos.
Since you asked for OS and not Linux: OpenBSD and FreeBSD are beautiful systems w/o systemd. I would switch in a heartbeat if I wouldn’t need Linux for work reasons.
This feels like an “I would switch to Linux if I didn’t need Windows for work” comment from another universe.
Fair point. :-)
At the end of the day, the OS has to run the software/applications one needs to get shit done… if it is macOS or Windows, that’s okay.
In my defense, I ran NetBSD for several years a long time back, and it was one of the best OS experiences I ever had. I am just old/pragmatic/flexible enough, to choose setups with less friction, if possible. ;-)
Still, I think it is a shame that Linux mostly took over the UNIX world and the BDS are left for hardcore nerds/embedding/game consoles and Solaris and co are not viable options anymore. Portable software and its stability benefited a lot from bugs detected on other platforms (OpenBSD was always a forerunner here).
BSD is to Linux users what Linux is to Windows users.
Not sure what you want to express. I actually used BSD a long time back, and the quality/documentation/coherence/beauty of the system are/were just on another level… Running Debian for nearly a decade now, because of compatibility (with hardware and software I need)… Linux improved a lot in the last nearly 3 decades and I am happy it exists, still I would be more happy if the BSDs would have stayed at least on an equal footing.
I think the comment speaks for itself. There wasn’t anything deep behind it. It literally just mean “Linux users look at BSD users how Windows users look at Linux.” Bewildered, mystified maybe? It’s just lower on the “food chain”, and they are surprised to see people using it because it’s missing “X” feature they can’t live without, for many people that being gaming. I’m in the same camp.
It was not a comment on the quality of the software, as I have never used it. I would love to tinker with it one day to see the differences, but I can’t see myself ever switching to it, even if I admire/envy some of the better parts compared to Linux.
Thanks for clarification!
… and I think you are point on, by now, the ship has sailed. I could use FreeBSD/OpenBSD on servers, but I’d rather run Debian everywhere. On desktops and for day to day usage, the BSDs are no viable options anymore, they simply lack support for common hardware (Wifi etc.) alone and the BSDs will realistically never be able to catch up the chasm anymore.
I feel there’s a similar relation between Mac :: Ubuntu (me) :: Arch.
I try to explain to folks that I have very little interest in anything outside of /home. I truly use Ubuntu because I like the desktop and Steam works and I have all the dev tools I need. But a certain type of otherwise competent Mac-using developer thinks I must be a 1337 h4x0r to even dare to use Linux for actual work.
Any “hate” in regards to you using Ubuntu is more likely to do with controversy involving Canonical than it is you using a beginner-friendly distro. People are more likely to be kinder to the Mint user.
Fediverse has its own baseline.
